

THE STUDY OF 
AMERICAN HISTORY 

BY VISCOliJNT BRYCE 



WATSON CHAIR INAUGURAL LECTURE 1921 i j 



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THE STUDY OF 
AMERICAN HISTORY 



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THE STUDY 

OF 

AMERICAN HISTORY 

BY 

VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 



BEING THE INAUGURAL LECTURE OF THE 
SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR OF AMERICAN 
HISTORY, LITERATURE AND INSTITUTIONS 



WITH AN APPENDIX RELATING TO 
THE FOUNDATION 



CAMBRIDGE 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1921 



■ 6 



PREFATORY NOTE 

By the Secretary 
OF THE Anglo-American Society 

tORD BRYCE'S INAUGURAL LECTURE 
^ under the Sir George Watson Foundation, 
which is here presented to the public, was delivered 
at the Mansion House, London, on Monday, June 
27th, 1 92 1, before a large and representative assem- 
bly, including many American visitors. The Rt Hon. 
Arthur J. Balfour, M.P., presided. 

Mr H. S. Ferris, the secretary of the Anglo- 
American Society, read a letter from the Prince of 
Wales's private secretary regretting that owing to 
the pressure of public engagements the Prince was 
unable to be present, "especially as this is a function 
which it would have given him special pleasure to 
attend, not only in view of the objects for which the 
Anglo-American Society exists, but as a further 
mark of his appreciation of Sir George Watson's 
generosity." 

Mr Balfour, who had to leave the Mansion House 
before Lord Bryce had concluded his address in 
order to attend the meeting of the Imperial Confer- 
ence, said there could not be a more fitting opening 
of what he hoped was going to be a fruitful course of 
lectures delivered in this country by authorities upon 



vi PREFATORY NOTE 

Anglo-American history than a lecture by Lord 
Bryce himself. He had every qualification for the 
task which he had so kindly undertaken. He had 
made his name as an historian of European repute 
much more than a generation ago, and that early 
reputation of his had been sustained and increased 
by all his subsequent work. He was not only a 
trained historian and a universal traveller, but he 
was also a special authority upon American subjects. 
He approached questions dealing with America with 
the special advantage that he knew the subject not 
merely from books, not merely from the sources which 
historians ordinarily drew upon in order to complete 
their picture of the past; he had in addition to that 
qualification, which he possessed in the fullest 
measure, the practical experience which residence in 
the United States had given him; a residence most 
important from the immediate diplomatic point of 
view, for he had to deal over and over again with 
questions profoundly interesting to both the great 
English-speaking peoples. In addition to that, he 
made himself acquainted with, and, I think I may 
say in the presence of American friends, beloved, by 
every section of public opinion in America, irrespec- 
tive of party, profession, tastes and all the other 
varieties of interest which divide mankind. That is 
a unique qualification. There is no man living who 
possessed it in anything like the same measure as 



PREFATORY NOTE vii 

Lord Bryce. Happy indeed were we to have secured 
his services on the present occasion. 

Mr Balfour continued: I need not say anything 
more except that to promote the mutual comprehen- 
sion of these two great Peoples seems to me the 
worthiest object which any man can propose to him- 
self at the present time. I do not believe that there is 
any cause which involves greater consequences for the 
future of civilization. I do not believe that there is 
any end for which it is more worth while striving and 
struggling, and I rejoice to-day that this view is not 
only held by students and statesmen like Lord 
Bryce, but has appealed to men who, like my friend 
Sir George Watson, have the imaginative insight to 
see how wealth can best be used, and who now, not 
for the first time in his beneficent career, has ex- 
pended great sums of money in a cause which I am 
quite confident will repay all the expectations which 
he has formed of it. 

At the conclusion of Lord Bryce's lecture a vote 
of thanks to the Lord Mayor, to Mr Balfour, and to 
the Lecturer, was moved by Alderman Sir Charles 
Wakefield, Bart., Hon. Treasurer of the Anglo- 
American Society and of the Sulgrave Institution. 

This was seconded by Dr Nicholas Murray 
Butler, President of Columbia University, New 
York, who said: "It is a privilege to be permitted 
on behalf of my countrymen, so many of whom are 



viii PREFATORY NOTE 

here present this afternoon, to second the vote of 
thanks to the Lord Mayor, to Mr Balfour, and to 
Lord Bryce, and I hope I may be permitted to add, 
to Sir George Watson, whose foresight and generos- 
ity have started a movement which one may con- 
fidently say is bound to have the largest and the 
happiest results. It would be unbecoming in me at 
this hour to detain you with any comments of my 
own, but perhaps I may say that the spirit in which 
Lord Bryce has approached his great subject this 
afternoon offers an introduction to the study of 
American history that is exceptionally inviting and 
exceptionally profitable. He has not chosen to dwell 
upon names or dates or purely political happenings 
and circumstances, but has rather sought for men- 
tion and emphasis those great underlying principles 
of social construction and of social and political inter- 
pretation which it has been, after all, the glory of the 
English-speaking peoples for a thousand years in so 
many ways to illustrate and to carry forward. I sin- 
cerely hope that this vote of thanks, which I am sure 
will be unanimously passed, will be the first of many 
witnesses of appreciation of successive lectures upon 
this foundation and of the generosity of him who 
has made it possible." 

After some words in support of the Resolution by 
the Marquess of Aberdeen, the Resolution was put 
to the meeting and carried with acclamation. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

PREFATORY NOTE . . . . v 

BY THE SECRETARY OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN 
SOCIETY 

THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY . i 

BY THE RT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 

APPENDIX 45 

RELATING TO THE FOUNDATION AND PURPOSES 
OF THE SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR OF AMERI- 
CAN HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND INSTITUTIONS, 
TOGETHER WITH A REPRINT OF THE ORIGINAL 
CORRESPONDENCE RELATING THERETO 

INDEX 59 

TLJTE 
PORTRAIT OF SIR GEORGE WATSON . . to face 45 



1. 



THE STUDY OF 
AMERICAN HISTORY 

By the Rt Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M. 

Y first duty is, if I may venture to make myself 
the spokesman of British students of history, 
to express their thanks to the munificent founder of 
this professorial chair, whose enlightened vision has 
discerned what was lacking in the provision made for 
the study of American history in England, and who 
has by this foundation gone far to remedy that defect. 
I do not say that we in England have studied ancient 
history, or mediaeval history, or modern European 
history too much, but we have studied American 
history too little. How great is the gain to be ex- 
pected from its study I shall presently try to indicate. 
For the moment let me be content to convey to the 
founder our sense of the great service his far-sighted 
generosity has rendered, and to express the confident 
hope that it will begin to bear abundant fruit. 

What does American history mean? To ask this 
question is to ask : When does American history begin ? 
To that question different answers may be given. 
Some will say it begins with the tribes who inhabited 
the North American continent from the era of im- 



2 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

memorial darkness, before they came into contact 
with any white men, even with the Icelanders who 
sailed from Greenland in the ship of Leif the son of 
Eric. The only data we possess for the study of those 
prehistoric days are to be found in a study of the 
relations between the languages of the different 
aboriginal tribes, and in the scanty relics which have 
been preserved in their burial places, and especially 
in the great mounds they erected in the wide spread- 
ing plains of the Upper Mississippi. 

Others will fix the beginning of American history 
in the earliest age of European colonization, that is 
to say, at the date of the enterprise attempted under 
Raleigh's auspices at Roanoke in 1585, or at the 
making of effective settlements at James Town in 
Virginia in 1607, and on the coast of Massachusetts 
by the Pilgrims in 1620. Many, however, — and I 
suspect they would include more than might be ex- 
pected of the less educated citizens of the United 
States — would, if the question were suddenly put to 
them, reply that their history began with the Declara- 
tion of Independence in 1776, when the peoples of 
the Colonies disclaimed the authority of the British 
Crown, and started on their career as a group of as- 
sociated Sovereign States. 

All these answers err by thinking of the Country 
rather than of the People who inhabit the country. 
The history of the Land belongs to geology. The 



THE BEGINNING OF AMERICAN HISTORY 3 

history of the aborigines, such as it is, belongs to the 
sciences of ethnology, philology, and folklore, and 
it is a history which has already come to its end. It 
was my good fortune to see the last two leading 
figures among the Indian tribes, one of them Sitting 
Bull, chief of the Sioux, ini88 jj__at the city j)f Bis- 
marck, in Dakota; the other, Geronimo, chief of the 
Apaches of Arizona, at Fort Sell in Oklahoma in 1907. 
There are now probably not more than a few thousands 
of aboriginal Indians of pure stock still surviving, and 
their descendants will soon be lost, absorbed into the 
growing white population of the West. The English- 
men who landed in Virginia in 1607, and on the 
bleaker shores of Massachusetts thirteen years later, 
did not begin a new history, but continued a history 
which had begun many centuries before. When did 
that old history begin ? We all remember the phrase 
with which Montesquieu surprised his contemporaries 
when he was describing to them the original lines of 
the English Constitution. "Ce beau systeme a ete 
trouve dans les bois." The history of those who 
settled North America began in the forests and on 
the shores of Holstein and East Frisia far back in 
days of which we have no native record save in myth- 
ology and poetry, in the worship of Woden and 
Thunor (Thunder) and Freya, and in the ancient lay 
of Beowulf. A branch of this Teutonic stock con- 
quered Eastern, Southern and Central Britain, and 

I — 2 



4 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

ultimately, intermingled with the Celtic population 
which they found there, grew to be the English 
nation, which, by the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, was already, for those days, a large nation, 
possibly of four millions, as large as the Scottish 
people or the Swiss people are to-day, and smaller 
than the Bulgarians or the Portuguese. It was from 
a tiny body of settlers belonging to that English 
nation, reinforced by later English immigrants, and 
with the addition of some Hollanders, Swedes and 
Germans, that the American nation sprang. 

Having already observed that the history of a na- 
tion is the history of the men who compose the nation, 
and not of their dwelling-place, and that it is, there- 
fore, a record of what the men were and of what they 
did, let us consider what this includes. It includes, 
primarily, their character; that is to say, the distinc- 
tive quality of their habits of feeling, thinking and 
acting, and secondarily, the institutions, social and 
political, in which those habits found expression. In- 
stitutions, when solidified by long practice, come to 
be, because respected and valued, a permanent factor 
in moulding and developing character itself. In its 
earliest form the American stock was the small branch 
of a large race dwelling in the North Temperate 
zone, possessing already, in its old home on the Euro- 
pean continent, certain distinctive gifts and qualities 
unlike those of the neighbouring racial stocks, Celtic, 



THE MEDIAEVAL NATION 5 

Slavonic and Italic, and having also institutions, 
though still in a rudimentary stage. Julius Caesar and 
Tacitus tell us that there were in the Germanic tribes 
kings honoured for their lineage, war-leaders chosen 
for their bravery, and popular assemblies, in which 
the more important decisions were taken. We cannot 
talk of a Germanic Nation, but of tribes, branches of 
a widespread race, among them Angles, Jutes and 
Saxons, tribes often at war one with another, and as 
yet without a collective national consciousness. When 
some of these tribes settled in Britain, raiding north- 
ward and westward from the spots where their war 
bands landed, they were still no more than the raw 
material of a nation, but they grew in the course of 
centuries to be a national state, and by the four- 
teenth century they had acquired a definite type of 
character, which was finding its expression in litera- 
ture, and they had also created an elaborate system 
of institutions, including a legislature, partly repre- 
sentative, courts administering justice throughout 
the country, an executive government, co-operating 
with, yet sometimes in conflict with, the elected 
representatives of the people. Foreign observers in 
the fifteenth century, such as Froissart and Aeneas 
Sylvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius II) and 
Philip of Comines already talk of the English as 
a people quite unlike the peoples of the continent. 
This may be called the second stage in the growth 



6 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

of the American nation. The third stage begins when 
an extremely small branch is transplanted to a new 
continent. The first migration was from a continent 
to an island, the second was from an island to an im- 
mense continent. In that continent these transplanted 
Englishmen do not cease to be English, but they 
presently, though very slowly, develop into a differ- 
ent kind of English, under the new influences which 
began from the first to work upon them. Much later, 
when they were politically separated from the British 
Crown, a new name was needed to distinguish them 
from the English who had remained behind in the 
old Mother Land, and so the term "American," 
theretofore employed to denote the aboriginal Red 
Men, came to be applied to the English of America 
as being now an independent nation. The use of the 
word made a great difference, for words have a 
curious power of implicit suggestion, a power inevi- 
table, but often misleading. In this case the name did 
mislead, and has gone on misleading. It made the 
less instructed part of the American nation forget the 
greatness of their spiritual heritage, and think of 
themselves as a new nation, when they were really 
part of an old nation to which their forefathers had 
belonged in those very days when it was reaching 
the highest level it has ever yet attained in poetry 
and thought. The age which sent Englishmen to 
settle in Virginia and Massachusetts was the age 



THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA 7 

of Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, of Bacon 
and Newton and Harvey, of Cromwell and Hampden 
and Jeremy Taylor and John Bunyan, glories of the 
English stock whom Americans have just as good a 
right to claim as has England herself. Thus the in- 
tellectual, moral and religious history of England 
for thirteen centuries, from the landing of the Jutish 
keels at Ebbsfleet in Kent in the middle of the fifth 
century A. D., is a part of American history. Whoever 
forgets this truth will fail to understand that history 
as a whole, in its most essential features. 

We may now pass to that third stage in which 
American history begins to be the history of America 
only, i.e. of that branch of the English stock which 
came under a new set of influences peculiar to the 
new land, and was at the same time removed from 
some of the influences which were thereafter to afl-ect 
the development of that then larger branch which, 
remaining in Britain, was in close contact with the 
European continent. But we must remember that the 
connecting influences of literature were still operative, 
because the language was the same, and all that was 
thought and written on either side of the Atlantic 
told upon men's minds on the other side. Bearing this 
in mind, let us consider what were the influences, 
peculiarto the new continent, which have slowlytrans- 
formed the children of the English settlers of the seven- 
teenth century into the Americans of the twentieth. 



8 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

First, a word or two upon Climate. The land in 
which the immigrants settled lay further south than 
England, yet even in the northern part of it the 
winters were colder, though the summers were hotter, 
than in the same latitude in Europe. Climate is not 
to be measured by latitude, and in the northern part 
of the United States other factors, such as winds and 
ocean currents, have so moderated the summer heats 
as to enable the old Teutonic stock to remain fully 
as strong and physically vigorous as it was when it 
left its European home. Some observers think that 
the race has become more nervously excitable, and 
so more susceptible to new ideas and sudden accesses 
of emotion. Without venturing to controvert this 
view, I incline to believe that climate has done less to 
modify national character than is generally supposed, 
so far as the cooler parts of North America are con- 
cerned. When, however, we regard those parts which 
lie south of latitude 2S° N. the case is different. Here, 
except in the hill-country, outdoor labour is, not in- 
deed impossible, but unwelcome to a northern race. 
The settlers thought that in the regions south of the 
Potomac and the Ohio they must procure some other 
kind of labour than their own to cultivate the land, 
so the example which had been set by the Spaniards 
in the Antilles was unfortunately followed. Negroes 
were brought from Africa to work as slaves, and thus 
in the southern colonies there grew up a social system 



THE SETTLERS IN THE SOUTH 9 

quite different from that of the northern regions, in 
which the white owner had been tilling his own 
farm. When, owing to the invention of labour- 
saving machinery, the cultivation of cotton became so 
huge and highly profitable an industry, that immense 
quantities of that fibre were thenceforth sent to the 
markets of Europe, the welfare of the inhabitants of 
the South was deemed to be bound up with the main- 
tenance of slavery. Estates were large, a planting oli- 
garchy grew up and controlled politics, the humbler 
part of the white population sank into a condition 
far below that of the northern whites. Whether the 
character of the Southern people has been perma- 
nently affected may be doubted, for the old planting 
aristocracy has now almost disappeared, while the 
poorer element among the whites has risen. But it 
must be confessed that the respect felt for justice, 
law and order was more or less temporarily impaired, 
and the habit of lynching has not yet vanished. As 
you all know, the presence of a negro population ex- 
ceeding ten millions remains a source of trouble and 
disquiet. 

Another new factor that told upon the character 
of the race in its new home, was the absence in the 
earlier days of some of the external appliances of 
civilization, and the consequent need imposed upon 
the settler of self-help and individual exertion. It was 
only at intervals that attacks by the Indian aborigines 



10 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

were to be feared, but Nature has had always to be 
resisted and overcome, and the effort to subdue her 
evoked energy and became a spur to invention. To 
this let us add that in the northern states the settlers 
found themselves relieved from the pressure of a 
territorial aristocracy such as had maintained social 
inequalities in England. The American cultivator, 
especially in the north, owned his land, and until the 
middle of the nineteenth century no great fortunes 
were amassed in trade or manufacturing industry. 
Conditions so favourable to social equality had existed 
nowhere in Europe except in rural Switzerland and 
in Norway. When the great colonizing movement to 
the West began across the Alleghany Mountains into 
the valley of the Ohio River and along the shores of 
the Great Lakes, the conditions of the first settlers 
were repeated. Among men who find themselves in 
a wild country, where everyone has like difficulties 
to face and needs the help of others, there is no 
room for assumptions of superiority, and each is 
judged by what he can do. Characters are strength- 
ened, resourcefulness is developed, and there is also 
induced a sort of recklessness and a disregard of 
conventions which does not subside for two or three 
generations. Theodore Roosevelt often said to me 
that the pictures Dickens drew in Martin Chuzzlewit 
of the West as he saw it contained a good deal of 
unpleasant truth. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ii 

The political change from a government, nomi- 
nally monarchical and administered by governors sent 
from England, to republics whose executive heads 
were elected by the citizens, counted for less than 
did those influences of the new country which I have 
already described, because the colonists had long 
enjoyed self-government for most purposes, and the 
main lines of their character were already fixed. 
Nevertheless, the Revolutionary war, and the inde- 
pendence it won, did make a difference. To have (no 
doubt with the aid of France) thrown off the 
sovereignty of an old and powerful state after de- 
feating its army, heightened the self-confidence of 
the people. To have done this in the name of Liberty, 
though there had in fact been very little that could 
be called oppression, quickened their march towards 
the goal of absolute political equality, and gave them a 
faith in abstract principles and high-sounding phrases 
which had theretofore been absent from the normal 
American as from the British mind. Faith in liberty 
would have been altogether wholesome and inspirit- 
ing had it not made the republicans of the four 
generations that followed the Revolution forget that 
there are other powers beside those of kings which 
may threaten liberty. 

One cannot speak of the great separation and all 
the consequences that followed it, not merely for 
England and America but for the rest of the world, 



12 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

without asking what would have happened had the 
poHtical link with Britain remained unbroken. 
Though the colonies must, as time went on, have 
become with their growing population even more 
fully self-governing than they had been before 1776, 
they might have continued to be united to the mother 
country so far as foreign relations were concerned, 
for the connection would have been for the benefit 
of both, since France and Spain still held territories 
to the south of them, and the navy of Britain would 
have served the colonists then as it serves Australia 
and New Zealand to-day. The misfortune was, not 
so much that independence came, as^that it came in 
the way it did. None of the current assumptions by 
which enthusiastic optimists beguile themselves has 
less basis than that of believing the thing which has 
in fact happened to have happened for the best in 
the long run. In 1776 things might have happened 
otherwise, and happened far better. England suffered 
from the fact that the English Government was then 
in weak or unskilful hands. There were strong and 
wise statesmen in England, but they were not in 
power. The men who controlled affairs were some of 
them short-sighted and incompetent, some of them 
narrow-minded, some of them subservient to a per- 
verse and obstinate king. As there are moments in 
history when the presence of a great man turns the 
current of events and saves the situation, so, also, are 



IF SEPARATION HAD NOT COME 13 

there times when his absence means disaster. Indepen- 
dence, virtual or legal, ought to have come gradually 
and peacefully as the natural result of American 
growth. Coming as the result of a war it left bitter 
memories behind, which poisoned the relations of the 
peoples for generations thereafter. Supposing that, 
controversies having been amicably settled and diffi- 
culties adjusted, independence had not come in 
1776 — 1783 let us indulge ourselves in a little post- 
prophetic speculation as to what the course of events 
might have been. Would there have been a Revolu- 
tion in France? A collapse of the Bourbon monarchy 
would probably have come, but there might have 
been no volcanic cataclysm had there not been in 
America a successful proclamation of democratic 
doctrines which when they spread to Europe brought 
republicanism into the realm of actuality. 

Would the economic development of a still colonial 
America have advanced so swiftly as it did under an 
independent republic.'' Would the adventurers who 
streamed forth into the western wilderness, and built 
up new states there, have been as bold and pushful 
as were the American frontiersmen from 1790 to 
1850.'' And if development had been slower might 
it not have moved upon better lines.? Has not the 
American West grown too fast.^* 

Let us take another point. Might not the struggle 
over slavery from 1820 onwards have been less hot 



14 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

and angry, and been guided to a less terrible denoue- 
ment than that of civil war? Might not the influence 
of the mother country, and the example which she 
set in 1834 of abolishing slavery in the West Indies 
and South Africa, have brought about a peaceful 
compromise? If the American people had not con- 
sisted of states claiming sovereignty though united 
in a federation, but had continued to be divided into 
a number of practically self-governing colonies held 
together by some looser tie, each of these would 
probably have solved the problem for itself, on the 
lines it thought best, with the co-operation and advice 
of the mother country. The British government 
would not have attempted to interfere with slavery 
in a masterful way, but the public opinion of an un- 
divided and impartial British people might have 
been a potent factor, suggesting gradual emancipa- 
tion and the best method of attaining it. 

So far the balance of advantage would seem to in- 
cline in favour of a continued connection between 
Britain and the colonial Americans, just as we in 
England to-day think the connection of the Self- 
Governing Dominions with Britain and with one 
another to be for their interest quite as much as for 
ours. But there is an objection fit to be considered. 
It may be said, and it was at one time natural to say, 
that the American Revolution saved liberty for Eng- 
land as well as for America, and at least hastened its 



IF CONCESSIONS HAD BEEN MADE 15 

victory in Continental Europe. As Sir George 
Trevelyan has admirably shown in his history of the 
American Revolution, the revolutionary war came 
near to being a sort of civil war in England as well as 
America, and the English Whigs of that day held the 
freedom of England to be involved in the struggle. 
A crushing defeat of the revolting colonies would, 
doubtless, have been a set-back to Whig prospects, 
but if those concessions to the colonists which 
Chatham and Burke desired had been made, no such 
result would have followed. The forces which were 
already at work, both in Britain and in continental 
Europe, were, as we can now see, far too strong to 
have been overborne by a succession of kings like 
George III, or even by a succession of kings like 
Frederick II of Prussia. It is to-day plain enough that 
the extinction by economic causes of the relics of 
feudalism, and the disappearance of the old rever- 
ence on which hereditary monarchy had relied, 
would, sooner or later, have overthrown absolute 
government in France, Germany and Italy. 

On the other hand one consideration rises to the 
minds when we regard the consequences, not merely 
to the British stock, but to the world at large, which 
the continued political union of Britain with America 
might have involved. 

Might not a highly civilized state embracing both 
the United Kingdom and the American people, a 



i6 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

state already possessing the most powerful navy in 
the world, and spreading out, as it was evidently 
destined to spread, over the territories Britain has 
subsequently appropriated in the south temperate 
zone, a state dominating the sea, possessed of re- 
sources in money as well as in men far beyond those 
of any other state in the world, — might not such a 
state have become a menace to its neighbours? 
Would not the sense of preponderating power have 
tempted it to abuse that power, to seek a world 
dominance, to create an antagonism to itself, such 
as the Empire of Charles V created in the sixteenth 
and that of Napoleon created in the early nineteenth 
century? These, however, are speculations, seductive 
but unsubstantial, and the higher we carry the airy 
edifice, piling hypothesis on hypothesis, the more 
unsteady become the upper storeys. I will not try to 
build the edifice higher, content to have suggested a 
topic in which imagination may revel at leisure. 

Returning from this digression, let me note another 
influence, which, beginning about 1830, has ever 
since determined the channel in which the energies 
of the American people have tended to flow. This is 
the development, without precedent in the annals of 
mankind, of wealth derived from what Nature had 
bestowed on a new and amazingly productive coun- 
try. During the nineteenth century immense fertile 
tracts have been brought under cultivation, forests 



MATERIAL PROGRESS 17 

hewn down, coal and iron, silver and copper, worked 
on a vast scale, while the transport of these products 
to the Atlantic coast has provided employment for 
hundreds of thousands and, latterly, for millions of 
workers. Nearly all the more vigorous minds in the 
nation were drawn to a business life and politics 
suffered, partly by the greater attraction business 
exerted, partly by the habit, which preoccupation 
with commercial interests fostered, of leaving politics 
to be managed by politicians. The large-minded 
thinkers who adorned the last years of the eighteenth 
century left few successors. Most of the brilliant 
literary group that gave lustre to the middle of the 
nineteenth, were born before 1830. That develop- 
ment of the universities which has rendered inesti- 
mable services to America since 1880 had scarcely be- 
gun. These causes made the material progress of 
America run ahead of its progress in letters and arts, 
though there was no diminution in the total volume 
of intellectual force which the nation possessed. 

Now let us turn to another phenomenon of su- 
preme consequence in its ultimate influence on the 
population of the United States. Immigration from 
Europe, which had gone on steadily though slowly 
from the middle of the seventeenth century, sud- 
denly grew in volume when the middle of the nine- 
teenth was reached. It has not sensibly affected the 
States with a very large coloured population, viz. 



1 8 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

those that He south of the Potomac and east of the 
Lower Mississipi, but in the North and West it has 
reached vast dimensions. This increase was, at first, 
chiefly due to an outflow from Ireland, where famine 
was raging. Twenty years later it expanded still 
further by the arrival of new immigrant swarms 
from Germany and the Scandinavian countries. 
Still later, between 1880 and 1890, another flood 
began to sweep in from Central and Western Europe, 
and even from Western Asia. While Irishmen had 
congregated in the larger cities, the Germans, 
Swedes and Norwegians went to settle on the land. 
Nearly all of these last, either already knowing or 
easily learning the English language, soon inter- 
mingled with the native American population, and 
were absorbed into it, acquiring American habits of 
thought and action. German as well as the Irish 
immigration had shrunk to small dimensions before 
1 9 14, for the German government was trying to re- 
tain its subjects, while the population of Ireland had 
so much diminished, and its economic condition had 
so much improved, as to reduce the tendency to ex- 
patriation. Both the Celtic and the Teutonic stocks 
were already present in the United States, for both 
had gone to the making of the British race, so that 
no great change in the essential racial qualities of 
American character, as it had existed among the 
early colonists, followed the influx of these new Celts 



THE RECENT IMMIGRANTS 19 

and Teutons. But the later arrival of such races as 
Slavs and Italians, Russian and Polish Jews, Greeks 
and Roumans altered the case. They brought en- 
tirely new strains of blood into the stock. They were 
comparatively uneducated, coming from the lower 
social strata in their respective countries, and were for 
the most part untrained in self-government. Very few 
spoke English, and as they settled in huge blocks, 
mostly in large industrial centres, they were less 
readily assimilated. What difference then has their 
coming made in the character and habits of the 
American people.'' 

In economic, social, and political life, some results 
are already visible. Those newcomers, who now form 
the bulk of the unskilled labourers in the northern 
half of the United States, have plenty of native intelli- 
gence, and a few men of conspicuous talent have 
already risen from their ranks. But being ignorant 
and prone to fall under the influence either of foreign 
propagandists, or of leaders of their own race, they 
are easily drawn into industrial strife, and are more 
disposed to violence than are the native Americans. 
When they acquire votes and are enrolled in a 
political party, their inexperience throws them into 
the hands of their chiefs, and makes them an element 
whose power it is hard to calculate either in elections 
or when labour troubles arise. But — and this is the 
point to be noted by foreign observers — they are 



20 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

still unassimilated, and have not yet had time to 
affect what may be called the normal type of the 
American people. It remains to be seen how soon, 
and in what way, they will affect it. 

Here we are met by a question which has never 
arisen before either on so great a scale, or under 
conditions which enable it to be so carefully observed, 
a question needing examination by physiologists and 
anthropologists as well as by historians. There have 
been many cases of race intermixture, but in ex- 
tremely few of these have we statistical records suffi- 
cient to furnish data for scientific conclusions. The 
problem may be stated as follows : When two or more 
races mix their blood what is the comparative im- 
portance of blood, i.e. of Heredity, on the one hand, 
and of Environment on the other, in determining the 
quality of the race which arises from the mixture? In 
the United States the child of Italian or Czech parents 
grows up ignorant but intelligent, untrained to any- 
thing but hand labour, yet inheriting certain inborn 
tendencies and propensities, and possibly, also, draw- 
ing from his parents certain beliefs and habits. The 
boy goes to an American school, where he imbibes 
the ideas and imitates the ways of the American youth 
around him, and as he grows up reads the same 
newspapers, hears the same talk. Unless his parents 
are well-educated persons, he is eager to forget their 
race and to become immediately, and for all purposes, 



INFLUENCES ON THE IMMIGRANTS 21 
an American and nothing but an American. He 
waves the Stars and Stripes, he sings in the class : 

My country, 'tis of thee 
Sweet land of liberty . . . 

with more effusion than if his ancestors had come 
over in the 'Mayflower.' Yet the blood remains. He 
is not, he cannot make himself, altogether an Ameri- 
can, divesting himself of the parental tendencies, of 
the emotional excitability of the Czech, or the im- 
pulsiveness of the Italian. To what extent then will 
these racial qualities pass into and modify the Ameri- 
can mass ? How far will a crowd, twenty per cent, of 
which is of Polish or Greek or Jewish parentage, differ 
from a native American crowd ? When three genera- 
tions have passed, how far will the population of any 
city, one-half of the blood in whose veins comes from 
East European sources, feel, think, and act differ- 
ently from the way in which the people in that city 
felt, thought and acted thirty years ago, say in 1880, 
before the East European flood had swollen ? The city 
was then four-fifths English, the rest North Euro- 
pean or Irish. In i960 not more than a half will be 
of English blood, but all will be English-speaking, 
and permeated by American influences. Though no 
one can answer the question I am putting, this much 
at least may be said. There has never been anywhere 
an environment of more pervasive and compulsive 
power than that into which the immigrant is plunged 



22 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

when he lands in America. He seems to melt in it as a 
lump of sugar melts in a cup of tea. Yet one cannot 
but believe that the influence of heredity remains. 
If we discern racial traits in the individual man, and 
explain points in his character by saying he has a 
strain of Greek or Polish or Jewish blood, must not 
the inherited quality of the individuals modify the 
quality of the mass ? 

The question can never be fully answered, because 
causes other than heredity are always modifying 
national character from one age to another. When, 
sixty years hence, observers compare the character 
of the American of 1980 with that of the American 
of 1880, it will be impossible to determine how 
much of the change is due to this particular cause. 
The character of a nation, like that of an indi- 
vidual, is always undergoing changes, too subtle to 
be discernible at any given moment, but evident 
after the lapse of years. They are retarded or ac- 
celerated in the political sphere by the presence or 
absence of the institutions and traditions which are 
continually educating and forming men's habits of 
thought and action, making the habits flow in certain 
channels and deepening those channels. But it must 
be remembered that institutions themselves are al- 
ways changing, if not in their form yet in the manner 
of their working. Nothing can arrest either decay or 
growth except death, and health consists in the 



THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 2^ 

power of always eliminating the dying tissues and 
replacing them by those in which life is vigorous. 

Thoughtful men in America are disquieted when 
they see under their eyes a change passing upon the 
elements in the population far greater than has ever 
passed before upon the English stock since it first 
came to Britain in the fifth century of our era. Some 
fear a permanent injury to the moral, perhaps also to 
the intellectual quality of the stock. Others believe 
that the power of literature and education and the 
old traditions of the nation will preserve what is best 
in the essentials of character. Uncertain as the future 
is, one who has watched the process during many 
years finds reason for sharing the more hopeful belief. 

Having considered the character of the American 
nation as modified by American conditions we may 
proceed to its concrete manifestations. Salient 
features will stand out when we note what the people 
have produced and how they have faced the crises 
that have arisen in their career. 

The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 
1787 and set to work in 1789, may be deemed the 
greatest single contribution ever made to Govern- 
ment as an applied science. It was less original than 
some of its foreign admirers have supposed, for the 
best of its arrangements were not fire-new, but drawn 
partly from the constitutional laws and usages of 
England, partly from the Constitutions of the several 



24 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

States, which were themselves modifications of the 
laws and usages under which the States had been 
living when they were colonies. But the structural pro- 
visions embodied in the Federal Constitution were so 
well selected from the materials which lay before the 
framers, and were so skilfully fitted together to form a 
compact whole, firm yet elastic, capable of bearing the 
strain which changing circumstances might impose, 
that the authors of the Constitution deserve all the 
praise they have received. The parts of that famous 
document which experience has most emphatically 
approved are the sections which create the federal 
system, and which guard its working by assigning to 
an impartial and technically competent tribunal the 
function of expounding what the mind and will of 
people probably were, and must, anyhow, be taken to 
have been, when they enacted the fundamental instru- 
ment. A federation which was created for thirteen 
States, covering an area of 335,000 square miles, 
with a population of about 3,000,000, has been made 
applicable with far less friction than could have been 
expected to forty-eight States, covering an area ten 
times, and a population thirty-six times as large. 
This system has been taken as a model by every 
country that has since its date adopted a federal 
scheme of government, including not only the 
Republics of Spanish-America, but also Switzer- 
land, Canada and Australia, and also, in a less 



COMPARISON WITH ENGLAND 25 

degree, South Africa and the present Republic of 
Germany. 

Less successful, yet, when we consider the diffi- 
culties to be overcome, hardly less skilfully con- 
structed, has been that part of the Constitution 
which determines the relations of the two chief de- 
partments of the National Government — the Legis- 
lature and the Executive. No frame of government 
made to be worked in a large country has ever suc- 
ceeded, except for short periods, in adjusting these 
relations so as to combine efficiency, promptitude 
and safety. The most successful was, probably, the 
scheme of British Government as it worked for the 
half century which followed the Reform Act of 
1832. Comparing that scheme with the American 
scheme we may say that the British excelled in a 
concentration of power which permitted swift and 
decided action, while the merit of the American con- 
sisted in the safeguards it provided against ill-con- 
sidered action or the usurpation by either department 
of the proper functions of the other. The one system 
was built for speed, the other for safety. One provided 
a method by which decisions can be reached with 
the minimum of delay, the other a method which 
averts the risk of decisions not representing the true 
and deliberately considered will of the majority of 
the people. The British method is forced to take the 
risk that decisions may be wrong, the American 



26 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

method the risk that decisions may be dangerously 
delayed. The capital instance of the latter fault may 
be found in the controversy which so long harassed 
America regarding the extension of slavery. The 
National Government tried for forty years to settle 
this question, but no settlement could be reached, 
and the result was civil war. English critics used to 
think this a fatal blot, and praised the efficiency of 
their own system, but they have latterly come to per- 
ceive that their own frame of governmentmaysucceed 
no better. The British Parliamentary System has for 
more than eighty years failed to settle a question less 
formidable, indeed, but always threatening strife 
and deranging the proper working of its own machi- 
nery, that of securing peace and good government in 
Ireland. Each country has to admit some failures, 
and neither country is likely to part with its own 
scheme to adopt that of the other country. Each 
would prefer to steer its course among the rocks and 
shoals which it has learnt to know, rather than to 
venture into what is for it the uncharted sea of the 
other. Whatever may be the merits of the British 
system for a nation which inhabits a comparatively 
small area, few will think that this system would suit 
a people more than twice as numerous, and occupy- 
ing a territory more than fifty times as large. 

The framers of the American Constitution have 
been blamed for leaving open the question whether 



CONDUCT OF FOREIGN RELATIONS 27 

any state had a right to secede from the Union, since 
this unsettled point ultimately provided an occasion 
for a civil war in which both sides had what lawyers 
call an "arguable case." But it must be remembered 
that if the framers had tried to determine that ques- 
tion in advance, there would have been no Constitu- 
tion at all. State feeling was so strong in 1787—8 
that a denial of state sovereignty would have led to 
the rejection of the Constitution when it was pre- 
sented for adoption to the peoples of the States, 
while on the other hand, to have recognized state 
sovereignty so far as to permit secession, would have 
been to open a door to the very evil it was desired 
to avoid. As prudent statesmen, they thought it better 
to take the chance that a right neither admitted nor 
denied would ever be exercised, than to invite the 
immediate failure of their efforts. Their hope, though 
falsified by the event, was at the time a reasonable 
hope, and we cannot blame their choice. 

Another criticism made on the structure of the 
American National Government deserves a passing 
word because one of its features has from time to 
time had unfortunate results on diplomatic relations 
with other countries. The provision made for the 
conduct of foreign affairs has been charged with in- 
efficiency because, while the function of negotiating 
with foreign countries is left to the Executive, the 
confirmation of executive action and the approval of 



28 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

treaties rest with one branch of the legislature, the 
Federal Senate. The result of this division of powers 
is, that, though the President can in practice so 
handle foreign relations as to manoeuvre or precipi- 
tate the nation into hostilities, he cannot conclude 
a binding agreement with any other country. He can 
bring about war, but he cannot make peace. The 
benefits of a well-conducted negotiation may be lost 
because the Senate may refuse to approve, and a 
deadlock may result, involving the loss of a treaty 
on which infinite pains have been spent. Foreign 
nations find this situation embarrassing. They may 
bargain and compromise, and make one concession 
after another, and yet discover at last that all their 
efforts have been wasted. But they are not entitled 
to complain, because they must be taken to know the 
provisions of the Federal Constitution, and these 
provisions may be justified on the ground that an 
Executive which holds office for a fixed term cannot 
be entrusted with powers as wide as those which 
England allows to an Executive holding office from 
day to day at the pleasure of Parliament. A President 
may err, by precipitancy, or because he mistakes the 
mind of the People, so it was thought needful to 
limit his authority. In England it may happen that an 
Administration which negotiates with foreign states 
can, if it keeps its negotiations secret, bring the 
nation to a point where it must accept arrangements 



THE CONSTITUTION TESTED 29 

which It would, if left free, be disposed to condemn. 
Neither America nor England has yet come near to 
solving the problem how foreign affairs should be 
conducted and treaties concluded in conformity with 
the will of the people. The difficulty lies in the nature 
of the case, and particularly in the fact that in no 
country is public opinion sufficiently informed to 
exert the power which of right belongs to it. The 
case for popular control of diplomacy is irrefragable 
in theory, but theory presupposes a fuller knowledge 
of the facts by the people than any people has yet 
been able to acquire. ^^-^^ 

Before I pass from the Federal Constitution let 
me note three occasions on which its strength and 
flexibility were tested. One was seen in 1834, when 
a new set of men, less educated and more reckless 
than their predecessors, came into the control of 
affairs with the accession to the Presidency of Andrew 
Jackson. Had not the respect for the Constitution 
and the methods of working it been by that time 
fairly well settled, there would have been a serious 
dislocation of the machinery. Serious evils did, in 
fact, follow, but the ship rode out the storm and 
calmer weather returned after a while. On the other 
two occasions, under the pressure of civil war in 
I 8 6 1 -5, and of a foreign war in 1 9 1 7— 1 9, some pro- 
visions of the Constitution were practically suspended 
though, perhaps, not legally violated. But on both 



30 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

occasions when the stress had passed and normal 
conditions returned, the Constitution was seen to 
have sprung no leaks. 

I have mentioned the War of Secession, and as it 
is one of the great events of American history, two 
lessons may be noted which a study of its course 
suggests. One of these is the danger of ignoring or 
trying to override the permanent tendencies of hu- 
man nature. As we see the matter to-day, it was not 
only a crime, but a blunder to bring the negro from 
Africa and to force him to work as a slave in the 
midst of a community of freemen. This blunder, 
committed before there was any independent Amer- 
ica, is chargeable rather on England than on the 
early colonists, though it was the children of the 
latter that had to suffer for it^. Without it there would 
have been no Civil War, and the Southern States 
would to-day be free from a problem whose solution 
is not yet within sight and whose difficulties have 
been aggravated by the attempt made to deal with 
the question when the Civil War ended. This was 
the second blunder. The Federal Constitution was 
in 1868 and 1870 so amended as to confer the elec- 
toral franchise upon the recently liberated negroes. 
Wholly unfitted to exercise the franchise with ad- 

^ The efforts of the Colonial Assemblies of Virginia to stop the 
Slave Trade were frequently baffled by selfish interests powerful 
with the British Government. 



RECONSTRUCTION TROUBLES 31 

vantage to themselves, the coloured people fell under 
the control of white adventurers, many of them dis- 
reputable, who, since the white population of the 
states that had seceded were excluded from the suff- 
rage, enjoyed a free field for robbery and jobbery, and 
played havoc with administration and finance, hold- 
ing their power by negro votes. After a few years the 
southern whites, readmitted to the suffrage, recovered 
control, and thereafter, partly by force, partly by 
electoral frauds, and ultimately by a series of adroit 
legal contrivances, they regained a mastery which 
they have continued to maintain. The attempt to 
bestow political power on Africans, ninety-five per 
cent, of whom were unfitted by capacity and training 
to use it, had the result which ought to have been 
foreseen. It exasperated the whites, it injured the 
negroes, it has perpetuated trouble, and has, indeed, 
increased the friction between the races. Abstract 
theory and emotional sympathy for those who had 
suffered in time past had led the Northern statesmen 
to disregard the teachings of Nature. But Nature 
prevailed against theory. It may be true that optim- 
ism, taken all round, is better than pessimism, and 
it is obviously true that sentiment cannot be neglected 
as a factor in human affairs. Yet optimism and 
sentiment will always have their dangers. We see 
many experiments advocated to-day, and some 
actually tried, not less hazardous than that which 



32 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

the sanguine spirit of Congress attempted in the 
days of reconstruction after the calm wisdom of 
Abraham Lincoln had been withdrawn. How easily 
do men persuade themselves of what they wish to 
believe! 

If the end of the War of Secession was marked by 
one great error, it was marked also by one act of 
supreme wisdom. Never was a civil war followed by 
so little severity towards the vanquished. Though the 
victorious North had talked of the seceding South- 
erners as rebels, all sensible men felt how far from 
ordinary treason their action had been. No one was 
put to death for any political offence. Trials, to be 
followed by imprisonment, were talked of, but were 
put off with the tacit consent of the nation till they 
silently vanished away. So soon as fighting had 
ceased, bitter memories began to die out in the 
North, and presently they died out in the South also. 
I remember how, when General Sherman, in the 
course of whose march through Georgia the city of 
Atlanta had been destroyed by fire, came thither on 
an official visit less than twenty years afterwards, a 
leading citizen of Atlanta observed that the people 
of the city were glad to see the General though he 
was known to be rather heedless in the use of lucifer 
matches! It used to be said that the only Southerners 
who bore memories of the war were the two classes 
who had not borne arms — the clergy and the 



WHAT AMERICAN HISTORY CAN TEACH 33 

women. The reconciliation has now been complete, 
and the whole American nation is so reunited that 
from 1912 to 1914 the children of those who fought 
in the Northern armies and of those who had fought 
in the Southern armies, with the few veterans who 
had survived from the war itself, met to celebrate 
their own or their fathers' deeds of valour fifty years 
before on battlefields now marked by monuments 
which all alike honour. This, also, is a lesson to be 
pondered by statesmen whose vision is keen enough 
to look beyond the dust and smoke of recent con- 
flicts to days to come, though perhaps still distant, 
when each people in Europe will be peaceful and 
prosperous in proportion to the confidence which it 
can inspire in its neighbours, and the goodwill it 
can feel towards them. 

Time fails me to speak of other aspects of 
American history which deserve the special attention 
of the student. Nowhere in the modern world have 
economic issues exercised so potent an influence on 
politics. Nowhere has the problem of setting bounds 
to the power of commercial combinations and of the 
monopolies which combinations create, given so much 
trouble to legislators. Nowhere has party organisation 
been developed to such dangerous perfection. But 
each of these subjects would furnish materials for 
a treatise. It is enough to call the attention of 
Europeans to the wealth of material which American 



34 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

experience furnishes upon these and other questions 
which perplex, and some of which threaten, the welfare 
of civilized states. On one topic, however, I must 
dwell for a moment, because though it was once so 
familiar as to have become hackneyed, the present 
generation has begun to forget it. For nearly a century 
after American independence had been recognized 
in 1783, at a time when nearly the whole European 
continent was controlled by arbitrary governments, 
America stood forth to the world as the sanctuary 
of freedom. To the oppressed peoples she rose as the 
bright vision of a land where no man need tremble 
before king or priest, an Elysium of the West like 
that described in the Odyssey, where, far beyond the 
sundering ocean, fresh breezes of liberty were always 
blowing to refresh the hearts of men. That pre- 
eminent distinction it has ceased to hold. Freedom 
has now spread all over Europe. The Marxian Com- 
munists have indeed now begun to paint America in 
the blackest colours, as a land where the power of 
wealth grinds the poor, and for whose evils there re- 
mains no remedy except revolution. If the lines with 
which fancy decked it out were too bright a century 
ago, still further from the truth are the denunciations 
which it now receives. The sober judgment of history 
will always honour the founders of the Republic, and 
the people who have brought their Republic safe 
through many trials, for one supreme example which 
they gave to the world when it was sadly needed. 



AMERICA'S ACHIEVEMENT 35 

America has shown that it is possible to have a 
government of the people for the people on a scale of 
unprecedented magnitude, a scale undreamt of by- 
earlier generations. In all the nations of the Old 
World the habit of obedience to constituted authority 
came down from the ages when monarchs reigned by 
force, and by the awe which force inspired. Subjects 
obeyed because their forefathers had obeyed, and 
because armies were maintained to compel obedience. 
When, as in France in 1792, and in Russia in our 
own day, physical force failed, and authority was no 
longer defended by the spell of reverence, there 
succeeded first a short spell of anarchy, and there- 
after a force still more brutal and ruthless than that 
by which the old dynasties had reigned. So too the 
countries of Spanish America, though they called 
themselves Republics, showed for many a year after 
they had won independence, what happens when 
an obedience based only on fear and tradition has 
suddenly disappeared. But among the English of 
America the habit of respecting law and valuing 
order, though at some moments and in some places 
shaken, was never broken. When the time-hallowed 
authority of a monarch died out of the sky like wan- 
ing moonlight, the authority of the people rose, as 
the sun rises to rule the day. As the nation swelled 
in volume, the difficulty of maintaining order in 
huge populations scattered over vast spaces seemed 

3—2 



36 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

to grow greater. But the sense that law as the founda- 
tion of order is the guardian of common welfare, 
grew with the nation's growth. A national govern- 
ment whose physical power was represented by an 
army of less than one in a thousand of the population 
exercised an authority greater because less contested 
than authority had ever held in the despotisms of the 
Old World. The steady march of the national gov- 
ernment became so familiar that men wondered at it 
no more than the rustic wonders at the unchanging 
procession across the nightly heavens of the constel- 
lations which he has seen since childhood. But those 
who have studied human nature, and have seen what 
havoc ignorance and passion can work, and how in- 
finitely hard it has been to bring men to comprehend 
what is really their common good and work together 
for it, will marvel at America's achievement and 
deem it one of the longest steps in the march of social 
progress that mankind has yet taken. If ever those 
moral forces which have led more than a hundred 
millions of men, filling a vast continent, to obey that 
common will which they have provided peaceful 
means for ascertaining, if ever these forces that have 
created and preserved the sense of common duty and 
common interest, should show signs of decay, what 
hope would remain for the world ? Freedom in Amer- 
ica, as elsewhere, has been at some moments abused, 
at others undermined or filched away: but the pride 
in freedom and the trust in the saving and healing 



HISTORICAL EXPERIMENTS 37 

power of freedom have never failed her people, and 

have enabled them many a time to recover what they 

seemed to be losing. It is by the moral forces that 

' nations live. Moribus antiquis statres Romana virisque. 

Let me in conclusion touch briefly upon some of 
the causes which make a full and just conception of 
the problems with which the American people have 
grappled, and of such solutions as they have found, 
specially valuable to Englishmen. 

What is history but a record of experiments .f* 
Each country studies, and, if it is wise, endeavours 
to profit by the experiments which other countries 
try. Now the value of experiments varies with the 
similarity of the conditions under which any given 
experiment has been tried to those of the country 
which seeks to profit by the experiment. The more 
closely the two sets of conditions resemble one 
another the better entitled are we to draw conclusions 
and attempt predictions. Hence, Britain can profit 
better by the experience of America than can any 
other country, because the institutions and social life 
of the two nations are based upon old foundations, 
similar in their origin. Not only the institutions and 
laws, but also the conceptions of those things which 
constitute the values of life are just sufficiently dif- 
ferent to make us feel their essential likeness. An 
Englishman can in discussing any question with an 
American assume as a common starting point certain 
moral and intellectual axioms which he cannot assume 



38 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

in the case of any other people. The fact that neither 
people calls the other "foreigners" speaks for itself. 
This idea may be put in another way. History 
has for its subject human nature. It is the record 
of what man has thought, said and done. It is the 
lamp by whose light we see human nature in action, 
and we can understand the causes, the significance, 
the results of events in proportion to our compre- 
hension of the characters of the men or the nations 
concerned. When the records of man's doings 
in the ancient world or the mediaeval world per- 
plex us, this happens because we are so unlike the 
men of those days that we fail to appreciate their 
motives, and those mental qualities which are now 
(rather loosely) called their "psychology." So, like- 
wise, when we try to follow events passing in other 
countries we are apt to err from want of understand- 
ing the minds and impulses of, say, Russians or 
Arabs or Chinese. This is one of the great difficulties 
in the conduct of foreign relations. Diplomatists, if 
keenly observant, come to know the minds of the 
men among whom they are cast. Statesmen at home 
know less, and suffer for it, while the mass of the 
people is often quite at sea, because it misconceives 
foreign ways of thought. It has been truly said that no 
people has ever quite understood another. Thus the 
average man, having no means forjudging the feelings 
and behaviour of foreigners, is the victim of any 
misstatements or misrepresentations made by poli- 



AMERICANS AND ENGLISHMEN 39 

ticians or the press, and, consequently, each people 
wrongs other peoples and is indignant when It is 
wronged by others. When, as usually happens, one 
nation takes its impression of its neighbours from their 
government and their politicians, its judgments are 
pretty sure to be harsh. Moreover, each people thinks 
of the other in terms of the majority of that other, 
not knowing or caring to know how large or small a 
majority may be, or how many cross-currents may be 
running through the public opinion of the other. All 
this is inevitable, but the resulting judgments are so 
often erroneous and even unjust, that everything pos- 
sible ought to be done to enable each nation to look 
behind or through the government of another into 
the real feeling and wishes of its neighbour nations. 

Now, just as the experiments made by America 
are more profitable to Englishmen than are those 
made by other countries, so also it is easier for us, if 
we take a little pains, to understand American minds 
and feelings than to understand those of any other 
people. Reciprocal comprehension is, of course, best 
attained by the largest possible personal intercourse. 
The more Americans come to England and the more 
Englishmen go to America, the better for both. But 
as it is impossible for more than an extremely small 
percentage of each people to create by this means a 
genuine mutual comprehension of each by the other, 
the next best thing is for each to learn as much as 
it can about the history of the other. Here, again, it 



40 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

is only a small percentage that has the time and 
capacity for learning from history, but that small 
percentage ought to include the leading minds, and 
especially the public teachers speakers and writers 
of each country. With them it lies to form and guide 
public opinion in their respective countries. If the 
Englishmen on whom this function devolves address 
themselves more largely than heretofore to the study 
of American history, and acquire from it an insight 
into the character and tendencies of the American 
people, they will be far better able to judge current 
events, and escape from the atmosphere of misre- 
presentation or exaggeration, or honest misconcep- 
tion, which most of them have been obliged to 
breathe. The use of a common language does not 
necessarily conduce to friendship; rather is it often a 
source of bitterness, because the unfriendly things 
which are said in one country are carelessly or even 
maliciously propagated and diffused in the other. 
Knowledge, however, though it does not always make 
for goodwill, is yet always better than ignorance, for 
it may be extended and perfected. It is anyhow, even 
if less than perfect, the only foundation on which a 
sound judgment can be based. 

Without stopping to dwell upon the advantages, 
material as well as spiritual, which the friendship of 
the two nations would secure for both, I will pass 
to a wider aspect of the situation. In these days, no 
Englishmen can think of Anglo-American relations 



THE POWER OF A COMMON SPEECH 41 

merely in their effect upon his own country. Every 
view will be deceptive as well as defective which does 
not take in the other great peoples. We must learn 
to think in world terms. Now the growth of the Eng- 
lish-speaking races is the most significant pheno- 
menon of the last hundred years. That growth con- 
tinues, and is likely to continue. It would be folly 
as well as presumptuous vanity for members of our 
stock to undervalue the contributions made to 
thought and letters, science and art, which the other 
leading peoples, and especially those of France, Ger- 
many and Italy, have made and are making. These 
contributions have been in some directions as great or 
greater than our own. But it is the English language 
that has spread and is spreading most rapidly. It is the 
English-speaking peoples that have grown and are 
growing most rapidly in wealth and population, and 
that now conduct or control most of the commerce 
of the world. Their influence upon the world at large 
is, therefore, more potent than that of any other racial 
stock, and that influence would, if directed to the 
same ends, make a difference to world progress 
greater than any other influence could exert. I ask 
you to think not merely of political influence, though 
that is a form of action the power of which is most 
apparent and most calculable, but to consider also 
another kind of action, that which the opinion, the 
thought and the example of English-speaking men, 
wherever they dwell, be it in the United States or 



42 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

in Britain, in Canada or Australia or New Zealand, 
may exert upon the thoughts and purposes of civi- 
lized mankind. I treat that opinion as a single con- 
crete entity, because the possession of a common 
language, common habits of thought, common funda- 
mental axioms of conduct, together with the fact that 
whatever is written by the best minds in any part of 
the English-speaking world affects the best minds of 
the other parts, does give a kind of unity to the mind of 
English-speaking men which overrides all diversities 
among them. Differences of view will, of course, always 
exist inside each political community, and the views 
held by the majority in one community may sometimes 
be opposed to the views held by the majority in an- 
other, but just as these diversities do not prevent, but 
rather tend to develop and improve by intermixture 
and debate, the progress of opinion in any one country, 
so will they act in the English-speaking world as a 
whole, each people contributing to the progress of 
thought in the other. It may be said that this already 
happens as between all civilized nations, since they 
now stand in a "touch " with one another that is closer 
than ever before. But language counts for much. 
The common language and the common principles — 
what I have called the axioms of conduct — bring the 
different English-speaking peoples nearer to one 
another than to any other people or stock. Regard 
them as a community in the widest sense, and suppose 
its general opinion to be playing round such large 



INTERNATIONAL GOODWILL 43 

questions as those of the maintenance or reduction 
of armaments, the protection of native races, the 
freedom or restriction of economic intercourse be- 
tween states, the extension or narrowing of the 
functions of government, and the many projects now 
discussed for the organization of industry by legal or 
extra legal methods, and further, suppose the experi- 
ments tried by each of the several members of the vast 
English-speaking community to be closely watched 
and studied by the other members, may we not be- 
lieve that the intellectual and moral influence of that 
opinion upon the world at large would be far greater 
than any one nation has exercised since the dissolu- 
tion of the Roman Empire? Now the first step 
towards the formation of such an opinion must be 
the fuller knowledge, the more perfect comprehen- 
sion by each English-speaking people of the mind and 
purposes of the other, not necessarily for the purposes 
of joint political action, however desirable that may on 
some occasions be, but in the broadly fraternal spirit 
which seeks the welfare of all mankind. It is in 
the development of intellectual and moral sympathy 
rather than in formal alliances, unions often unstable 
and sometimes excitingjealousy or suspicion in other 
nations, that we may find the kind of co-operation 
which will best promote that welfare. 

We see to-day an old world, a world weary of the 
past, distracted on this side of the Atlantic by a strife 
which perpetuates itself in creating fresh wrongs that 



44 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

breed fresh resentments and revengeful passions. 
The time has surely come when a supreme effort 
should be made to inspire in the most enlightened 
and far-sighted minds in all the peoples a spirit of 
goodwill which may replace international hatreds by 
a sense of common interests and a vision of the bless- 
ings concord may bring. The goal may be distant, 
but it is a splendid goal, one towards which we are 
bound to strive. 

I have spoken of American history as a part of 
the history of the English-speaking community of 
peoples. It is the history of that branch which is now 
the largest, the richest and the least assailable from 
without, yet whose fortunes are indissolubly linked 
with those of all the others. Through its three cen- 
turies of life in the Western hemisphere it has re- 
tained that boldness and resourcefulness and tenacity 
of purpose which belonged to the ancient stock that 
came from the Elbe to the Thames and from the 
Thames to the Hudson and onward to the Missis- 
sippi. It has cherished high ideals and holds fast to 
them still. Will it not be in days to come the glory 
of the free English-speaking peoples, to whom Provi- 
dence has given the widest influence, and therewith 
the greatest responsibility, that any group of peoples 
has ever received, if they should join in using that 
influence to guide the feet of all mankind into the 
way of peace. 




the founder of the first english chair of american 

history, literature and institutions 

Sir W. George Watson, Bart 



APPENDIX 

ORIGIN OF THE 
SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR 

IN 191 1, when it was preparing its Programme 
for the Celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty 
of Ghent (18 14-19 14) and of the completion of 
One Hundred Years of Peace among English-speak- 
ing Peoples, the British-American Peace Centenary 
Committee (which had the arrangements in hand 
for Great Britain) turned its attention to the pro- 
vision of adequate teaching of American History in 
British Universities. 

It discovered that no British University made de- 
finite and adequate provision for such teaching. 
There was no University in the British Isles which 
had either a Chair or Lectureship of American His- 
tory. This very grave deficiency in our educational 
apparatus the Committee determined to supply; and 
it placed the Foundation of a Chair of American His- 
tory amongst the foremost articles of its Programme 
for the Celebration. 

The outbreak of the Great War prevented the 
carrying out of this Programme more than in part; 



46 APPENDIX 

and before the War was over the British-American 
Peace Centenary Committee had been dissolved, 
handing over its functions to two allied and affiliated 
organizations which grew out of it — the Sulgrave 
Institution and the Anglo-American Society. 

In 1919 the Anglo-American Society revived the 
project of a Chair of American History as the first 
item of its national British programme for the Cele- 
bration of the Tercentenary of the 'Mayflower' and 
the Pilgrim Fathers; and in the last month of that 
year the generosity and public spirit of Sir W. 
George Watson, Bart., provided the means to realise 
this long-cherished plan. 

In the date of its foundation the Watson Chair 
has the honour of being the first Chair of American 
History established in the British Isles. 

The correspondence relating to its foundation, 
between Sir George Watson, H.R.H. the Duke of 
Connaught (President of the Anglo-American Soci- 
ety) and H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, is reprinted 
hereafter, for purposes of record. The warmth of the 
public reception of Sir George Watson's benefaction, 
and the appreciation of its international and educa- 
tional significance, is illustrated by the extracts from 
leading articles in prominent London journals which 
are also reprinted. 

The foundation fund of the Watson Chair has 
been invested by the Anglo-American Society, and 



THE WATSON CHAIR 47 

its proceeds will be used entirely in connection with 
the purposes of the Chair. 

The Chair has been given the broad title of a 
Chair of "American History, Literature, and Insti- 
tutions" deliberately; for the reason that it is desired 
to include all these subjects in the scope of its Lec- 
tures, from year to year, and also to draw upon a 
wide variety of eminent Lecturers, who will be able 
to interpret American life and history, in its broadest 
aspects, to the British people. 

It is not proposed that the Chair should be at- 
tached to any one University, but that it shall be 
used for the general purpose of stimulating interest 
in and study of America in all British Universities. 

Neither will the Chair be held permanently by one 
scholar, of a single nationality, but for a period of 
one or two years by American or British Scholars or 
public men, — thus drawing upon the best intellec- 
tual resources of the two countries, and securing a 
variety of treatment of the subjects dealt with. 

The Committee trust that this Foundation will 
assist to create in this country a wider knowledge of 
America to-day, and of the history, literature, and 
institutions of the great Transatlantic Common- 
wealth of English-speaking people. 

The Chair, it is hoped, will serve as a permanent 
memorial of America's loyal partnership with Great 
Britain in the Great War, as well as of the historic 



48 APPENDIX 

ties of kinship which unite the British and American 
peoples. 

Lord Bryce's Inaugural Lecture will be followed, 
in the Spring of 1922, by a Course of Six Lectures 
by President Hadley, of Yale University, on "Some 
American Economic Problems of To-day." These 
lectures will be given at different British University 
centres, and subsequently published in uniform 
style with the present volume. 

The Committee of the Anglo-American Society 
desire to acknowledge the great assistance they re- 
ceived from Sir Francis Trippel in bringing the sub- 
ject of the First Chair of American History to the 
attention of Sir George Watson, and in securing his 
practical interest in the proposal. 

All communications relating to the Watson Chair 
should be addressed to: 

The Secretary, 

Watson Chair Foundation, 

c/o The Anglo-American Society and Sulgrave Institution, 

I, Central Buildings, 

Westminster, 

London, S.W. i. 



THE WATSON CHAIR 49 

THE SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR 

The offer of Sir George Watson to found and 
endow a Chair of American History, Literature and 
Institutions, was conveyed in the following letter to 
H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, President of the 
Anglo-American Society under date of November 
27th, 19 19: 

SULHAMSTEAD HoUSE, 

Theale, Berks. 
Your Royal Highness, 

I have learnt with the deepest interest that the pro- 
gramme drawn up by the committee of the Anglo-American 
Society in connection with the Pilgrim Fathers tercentenary 
celebrations next year includes the foundation and endowment 
of a Chair of American History, Literature, and Institutions 
of a novel kind in Great Britain. 

I agree with the committee that the foundation of such a 
chair or lectureship would greatly assist in creating in this 
country a wider knowledge of America, and of its history, 
literature, and political, educational, and social institutions, 
thereby knitting more closely together the bonds of comrade- 
ship between the two great English-speaking democracies, 
upon whose good-will and friendship the peace of the world 
depends. 

I also share the committee's belief that, as a permanent 
memorial of America's loyal partnership v/ith the British 
Empire during the war as well as of the historic ties which 
unite our two peoples, nothing could be more fitting than the 
establishment of such an educational foundation. It would 



50 APPENDIX 

have considerable effect in clearing away the ignorance and 
the resulting prejudice, which should be frankly recognised 
on both sides of the Atlantic as the real stumbling block in the 
way of closer union between the two nations. In spite of the 
brotherhood of arms during the war, there is still a call for 
much discriminating labour to banish this prejudice. The 
diplomatic relations between the two countries would enter 
upon a smoother path if the far-seeing efforts of the statesmen 
on both sides were aided instead of hampered by the man-in- 
the-street; and the commercial relations, which as a conse- 
quent natural development must vastly improve, would do so 
with far more rapid strides if business men were to realise the 
fact that mutual knowledge means better trade. 

Every effort should, therefore, be made to prevent a weak- 
ening of the sympathies which have been so greatly stimulated 
between the two countries by the historic visit of His Royal 
Highness the Prince of Wales, and it is good politics, good 
business, good morals, to maintain them iirmly on their 
present high level. To all American residents in this country, 
or visiting it for business or pleasure, and to all British who 
have personal or commercial ties with the United States, it is 
a matter of moment that a reciprocal knowledge and sympathy 
should grow at a rapid rate and be rooted in a firm soil. And 
all enlightened men and women who — apart from personal 
or business interests — are possessed of a wide vision, must also 
feel an impulse to take advantage of any opportunity of fur- 
thering so desirable an aim. 

British universities and schools have hitherto given little 
attention to this important subject. It is necessary to generate 
a new interest in and make America and its life and thought 
better and more universally known and understood in this 
country. 

For all these reasons it would be a source of great pleasure 



THE WATSON CHAIR 51 

and satisfaction to me if your Royal Highness would consent 
to convey, as President of the Anglo-American Society, my 
cheque for ;/^20,ooo as a gift to His Royal Highness the Prince 
of Wales for founding and endowing the above-mentioned 
chair. 

The present juncture, when the echoes of the wonderful 
reception of the Prince of Wales by the American people are 
still reverberating throughout the world, seems to me a 
felicitous occasion for expressing the hope that His Royal 
Highness, on reaching the shores of his native land will 
graciously accept this free-will gift in the spirit in which it is 
given for the intended purpose, and allow the Chair to be 
named "The Prince of Wales's Chair of American History, 
Literature, and Institutions." 

Yours faithfully, 

W. George Watson. 



THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT'S REPLY 

The following is the Duke of Connaught's reply 
to Sir George Watson, dated December ist: 

Dear Sir George Watson, 

Lord Weardale, Chairman of the Executive Com- 
mittee, has transmitted to me, as President of the Anglo- 
American Society, your letter of the 28th inst. and the accom- 
panying cheque for ;^20,ooo. 

I will communicate your letter and gift to His Royal 
Highness the Prince of Wales immediately upon his arrival 
and he will doubtless personally address you on the subject; 
but I cannot refrain from at once giving expression to you on 
behalf of the Anglo-American Society how deeply we appre- 



52 APPENDIX 

ciate the high purpose which has inspired your magnificent 
donation, and the happy choice of the occasion of the return 
of the Prince of Wales from his most successful journey to 
give effect to it. 

This journey marks, we believe, a momentous epoch in 
the relations of America and Great Britain, The remarkable 
and generous manifestation of sentiment which his visit 
evoked among all classes in America shows how recent events 
and common ends pursued in fraternal union on the fields of 
battle have effaced all disturbing memories, and brought the 
English-speaking peoples into closer touch than at any time 
in their previous history. 

This great achievement you desire to signalise and develop 
to greater advantage by the foundation of a Chair of American 
History, Literature, and Institutions, which shall give to the 
rising generation a new interpretation of the past relations of 
the two nations, and new hopes and confidence in their 
future. 

It is difficult to imagine a more timely and well-directed 
benefaction, and the Anglo-American Society, in conveying 
to you their most cordial expressions of gratitude, can now, 
as a consequence of your striking and spontaneous interven- 
tion, contemplate with greater satisfaction the full realisation 
of their programme for the due celebration next year in Great 
Britain and America of the Tercentenary of the sailing of 
the 'Mayflower' and the Pilgrim Fathers. 

Believe me, yours sincerely, 

Arthur, 
President, Anglo-American Society.- 



THE WATSON CHAIR 53 



THE PRINCE'S LETTER 

The following is the text of the Prince of Wales's 
letter to Sir George Watson, dated St James's Palace, 
December 4th, 19 19: 

Dear Sir George Watson, 

Nothing could have more touched and gratified me 
upon reaching again the shores of Great Britain than the an- 
nouncement just made to me by the Duke of Connaught of 
your noble gift of ;r20,ooo for the foundation of a Chair of 
American History, Literature, and Institutions, and this is 
very pleasing to me as I have no personal connection with the 
Society. 

My all too short visit to the American Continent has con- 
vinced me of the common underlying sentiment which resides 
in all sections of the English-speaking world. Such differences 
as must naturally exist are more those of form and habit than 
of substance, and no purpose can be higher than the one to 
which your beneficence has been directed of endeavouring by 
educational effort to remove those false impressions which an 
erroneous interpretation of past history, or of the varying 
forms of our democratic communities, have created and still 
unfortunately prevail. 

May I, however, venture to suggest that it would be more 
fitting under these circumstances that the foundation should 
bear the name of the generous donor, and therefore be known 
as the Sir George Watson's Chair of American History, 
Literature, and Institutions? 

Yours sincerely, 

Edward P. 

4—3 



54 APPENDIX 

ENGLAND AND AMERICA 

From The Times leading article, December 5th, 1919. 

The foundation and endowment of a Chair for the study 
of American history, literature, and institutions is an inter- 
esting and valuable feature in the programme of the Anglo- 
American Society for the celebration next year of the sailing 
of the Pilgrim Fathers three hundred years ago. Sir George 
Watson has been happily inspired to make the return of the 
Prince of Wales from his historic visit across the Atlantic the 
occasion for the munificent gift of ;^20,ooo to this end. By 
the terms of the programme the donor has the right to have 
the Chair called after his name. Sir George proposed that it 
should be known as "The Prince of Wales's Chair," but the 
Prince, while acknowledging with the gratitude it deserves 
the gift and the suggestion, thinks it more fitting that the 
foundation should bear the name of the giver. That is the old 
tradition and the wisdom of preserving it will be generally 
recognised. The tenure of the Chair will be in some respects 
exceptional. It will not be established in any one of our uni- 
versities, or filled permanently by an individual professor. The 
scheme proposes that a British and an American scholar or 
public man should hold the office for periods of a year or two 
in alternate succession. There may be difficulties in working 
out the idea in practice, but of its excellence there can be no 
doubt. . . . 

The occupants of the new Chair from both sides of the 
Atlantic will turn themselves, we trust, thoughtfully and 
earnestly, to the great task of furthering Anglo-American 
inter-comprehension. There could hardly be a task nobler or 
greater. The understanding between Englishmen and Ameri- 
cans certainly can be made much more thorough than it has 



THE WATSON CHAIR 55 

been hitherto. We have learnt to know each other in war as 
we never knew each other before. We have now to supple- 
ment that knowledge in peace, and the close study of each 
other's history, literature and institutions is an indispensable 
part of the process. The neglect of American history in 
British universities hitherto has been almost complete. From 
a purely intellectual standpoint that is a serious loss. The 
interest of observing how a new and isolated society, originally 
equipped with our own moral and intellectual endowments 
of three hundred years ago, adapted them, rejected them, and 
added to them, as the needs of their peculiar civilisation de- 
manded, should fascinate any true student of comparative 
politics in the wide sense of this last term. A comparison of 
the results with those which we ourselves have attained, under 
the stress of European complications, from the same stock of 
ideas, principles, and habits during the same period would 
probably yield useful lessons in the practical art of govern- 
ment. . . . 

If the professors filling the new Chair are as sharp-sighted 
and as judicious (as the Prince of Wales, during his American 
visit) they cannot fail to foster a view saner and more whole- 
some than at present exists of the actual relations between the 
masses of the two chief English-speaking democracies, and of 
the measure of future development which these relations ad- 
mit. In that way they may do very much to ensure that both 
will pursue their independent courses in accordance with those 
"key" ideas which they hold, and have always held, in com- 
mon. 



56 APPENDIX 

ANGLO-AMERICAN STUDIES 

From The Observer \ea.dmg article, December 7th, 1919. 

The vision of the Mayflower Tercentenary Committee 
and the generosity of Sir George Watson have made possible 
an educational experiment which must needs have political 
effect. The new Watson Chair is no ordinary professorship. 
Its wide range — it covers the history, literature, and institu- 
tions of the United States — contrasts with the general tend- 
ency towards specialised research. The Chair is unique, too, in 
being attached to no one British University, and the period 
of tenure is exceptionally short. It is intended to combine the 
permanent quality of a professorship with the variety and 
freshness of annual lectureship, and so to found a school which 
shall have none of the traditional narrowness of a school. 
Altogether a most interesting educational departure. 

The political interest is, however, transcendent. Though 
there has been a solid development of Anglo-American friend- 
ship since the war, the two peoples have still much to learn 
of each other. In great things, indeed, Briton and American 
think alike. But in little things they differ profoundly, and, 
after all, life is largely made up of trifles. England is compact, 
homogeneous, socially stable, whereas America is scattered, 
full of racial incoherence, and socially fluid. It will be for the 
new Chair to show how these differences of circumstances 
produce divergencies in detail of temperament and outlook. 

The historical method proper to a professorship is specially 
appropriate in the study of Anglo-American relations. The. 
national life of both peoples is penetrated with a sense of 
tradition. Both are conscious of the historic past as an element 
in the present, and an influence in the future. In French 
history, 1789 marks a breach; new forces emerge and shatter 



THE WATSON CHAIR 57 

the old State. But in American history, 1776 emphasises a 
continuity; old forces gather their full strength and complete 
the fabric of the State. That is why the old uncritical Ameri- 
can patriotism represented Independence as the expulsion of 
certain evil elements from the body politic. That, too, is why 
text-books can affect Anglo-American relations so profoundly. 
Anglo-French friendship will not be influenced by contro- 
versies about Napoleon, but Anglo-American friendship is 
impossible without agreement about Washington. The great 
truth that hope for the future relations of the two peoples 
must be based upon a sober and just appreciation of the past 
is in need of special emphasis just now, when a spirit is abroad 
which treats everything before the war as negligible and talks 
of a fresh start for a new world. Britons and Americans above 
all other peoples, have in their bones a sense of the error of 
such reasoning. There are no fresh starts in human affairs; 
the consequences of what has been must needs work them- 
selves out for ever and make history by their working. To 
understand modern America, to interpret, for example, the 
Senate's recent policy aright, we must know what America 
has been, and such knowledge cannot come except by that 
study of American history, literature, and institutions which 
the Watson Chair has been founded to promote. 



INDEX 



Aberdeen, the Marquess of, viii 
"American," the name mis- 
leading, 6 
American Nation, origins of, 4 
American History 
President Butler on, viii 
Viscount Bryce on 
Too little studied in England, i 
When did it begin? i sq. 
First stage, 4 
Second stage, 5 
Third stage, 7 

Value of study of, to English- 
men, 37 jy., 39 
Linked with that of other 
English-speaking commu- 
nities, 42 
(See also Appendix) 
Anglo-American Friendship 
Mr Balfour on, vii 
Viscount Bryce on, 40 sq. 
Anglo-American Society, v, vii, 
46, 49, 50, 51-52 

Bacon, 7 

Balfour, Rt Hon. A. J., v-viii 
Bryce, Rt Hon. Viscount, v, vi, viii 
Bunyan, John, 7 
Burke, Edmund, 15 
Butler, President Nicholas Mur- 
ray, vii-viii 

Chair, The Sir George Watson 
Prince of Wales on, v, 52-3 
Duke of Connaught on, 51-2 
Sir George Watson on, 49-51 
Viscount Bryce on, i 
Mr Balfour on, v, vii 
The Times on, 53 
The Observer on, 55 
Appendix on origin of, 45 sq. 



Chatham, Earl of, 15 
Climate, Influences of, in U.S., 

8-9 
Colonization, in U.S., beginnings 

of, 2, 17-22 
Combinations, commercial, in 

U.S., power of, 33 
Comines, Philip of, 5 
Connaught, H.R.H. the Duke of. 

Letter from, 51 
Constitution, The American, 

23-8 
A model for others, 24 
Three tests of, 29 sq. 
Cotton, and slavery, 9 
Cromwell, Oliver, 7 

Dickens, Charles, 10 

Ebbsfleet, 7 

Economic issues, their influence 

on American politics, 33 
English-speaking Peoples, The, 

their supreme mission, 43- 

Equality, social, conditions 
favourable to, in America, 
II 

Eric, The Red, 2 

Executive, relations to Legisla- 
ture, 25 

Experiments, American, in gov- 
ernment, their value to 
English students, 37 

"Foreigners," English and 
American not to each other, 
38 

Foreign-affairs, U.S. machinery 
for dealing with, 27-8 
British ditto, 28 



INDEX 



59 



Foundation, The Watson Chair, 

(see Appendix) 
Freedom, U.S. not the only 

sanctuary of, now, 34 
American pride and trust in, 

35-36 
Froissart, 5 

George III, 15 
Germanic tribes, 5 
Government, popular, triumph 
of, in U.S. 34 

Hadley, President, 48 

Hampden, John, 7 

Harvey, 7 

Heritage, spiritual, etc. of the 

American people, 6 
History, U.S., 39 (see under 

American) 
Hundred Years Peace, 45 

Immigration to U.S., 17-22; 
Effect on American cha- 
racter, 19 

Independence, American, 2, 12, 

Indians, The American, 3, 9 
Influences, upon English settlers 

in America, 7 sq. 
Institutions, American, based on 

like foundations to English, 

37 
English, in 14th and 15th cen- 
turies, 5 

Intercourse, between U.S. and 
England, should be in- 
creased, 39 

Intermixture, racial, in U.S., 
20-22 

Ireland, outflow from, 18 
Problem of, 26 

Invention, spurs to, 10 

Jackson, President Andrew, 29 
Julius Caesar, 5 



Language, common, does not 
always conduce to friend- 
ship, 40 
English spread of, 40-42 

Law, similar origins of American 
and British, 37 

Law and Order, respect for, in 
U.S., 35-36 

Legislature, relations to Execu- 
tive, 25 

Liberty, ii, 33, 35-36 

Lincoln, Abraham, 31 

Literature, influence of Euro- 
pean on America, 7 

Lord mayor, of London, vii 

Lynching, 9 

Mansion house, London, v 

Milton, John, 7 

Monopolies, trouble to legislators, 

Moral forces, in American 

politics, 36 
Mother land, 6 

Negro, problem of, in U.S., 9, 

29 
Newton, Isaac, 7 

Parliamentary system, the 

British, 25 
Party organisation, dangerous 

perfection of, in U.S., 33 
Peace, of world, 43-44 
Perris, Mr H. S., v 
Pilgrim Fathers, 2, 46, 52 
Prehistoric, America, 2 
President, Limitation to powers 

of, 28 
Problems, American, and their 

lessons for the world, 37 

Relations, Anglo-American, vii, 

40, 50, 51, 54, 56 
Resources, of American territory, 

influence of, 16-17 



6o 



INDEX 



Revolution, The American, 1 1- 

12, 15 

Roanoke, 2 

Roosevelt, Theodore, lo 

Secession, War of, 29-31 
Senate, 28, 57 
Shakespeare, 7 
Sherman, General, 32 
Slavery, 9, 13, 25 
Spanish-America, 24, 34 
Spenser, 7 
SuLGRAVE Institution, The, vii 

Tacitus, 5 
Taylor, Jeremy, 7 
Trevelyan, Sir G. O., 15 



Universities, in U.S., 17 

In Britain, and American his- 
tory teaching, 45, 50, 54, 

Wakefield, Sir Charles, vii 
Wales, H.R.H. the Prince of, v, 

52-53 
War, The Civil, in U.S., 29-315 

Clemency after, 32 
Of Independence, 12 
Of 1914-1918, 47, 49 
Watson, Sir W. George, Bart., v, 

vii, viii, i, 46, 49-57 
Wealth, in U.S., 16 
Wear dale. Lord, 51 
West, The American, 10, 13 



printed in ENGLAND BY J. B. PEACE, M.A. 
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